Inter-University software engineering using web services

Abstract

We have been funded by the National Science Foundation [6] to investigate the feasibility of distributing large software engineering projects across multiple universities at remote locations. This paper reports on the use of web services to make such inter-university cooperation feasible. The TRavel Itinerary Planner (TRIP), a year long project, was implemented at three universities: Appalachian State University, North Carolina A&T, and DePaul University. After discussing our methodology based on web services we describe the inter-university cooperation that was achieved on this project. We then describe problems encountered and their solutions and conclude with a brief description of a different project that we will develop during the 2006-2007 academic year.

Developing a pedagogical infrastructure for teaching globally distributed software development

“…Staggered institution schedules force cross-location interactive material to have one or two weeks delay before the other institutions schedule begins. At the end of the class term the reverse can happen -one institution will finish early while the other institution's class continues without input and interaction [6].…”

Simulating Global Software Development in a Course Environment

“…Carefully coordinating submissions and phasing the contributions between the teams is critical. This project required tight coupling between the distributed teams, in contrast to the more loosely coupled approaches to distributed software engineering education [7].…”

Student development of web services for the STEM disciplines

“…In particular his students focused on the security aspects of implementing web services. During our initial efforts at integrating web services in an undergraduate software engineering course [9] and our Internet Programming course, students became bogged down in the implementation details of web services (e.g., SOAP, WSDL files, etc.) which were not our primary focus.…”

“…Even though the textbook [15] for Internet Programming focuses two chapters on these details, we now only present a conceptual overview of web services and rely on our IDE systems (Eclipse and Visual Studio) to carry out the lowest level implementation details. an excellent tool that allow computer science students at different universities to cooperate on the development of a single project, as reported in [9]. The platforms include Linux/Unix machines, Windows machines, and even handheld computing devices.…”

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We have demonstrated in our past work the value of using web services to allow computer science students at different universities to work together on the same project [9]. We are now developing web services to expose scientific data currently only available as html pages in response to user requests.

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